College: Software problems, lack of manpower were obstacles for compliance in lead-up to ISU’s major infractions case

Monday

Apr 15, 2013 at 10:50 AM

A report released last week by Iowa State detailing recruiting phone call violations by coaches across all 18 sports that the NCAA considers a "major infractions" case places a fair deal of blame at the feet of the athletic department's compliance office.

A report released last week by Iowa State detailing recruiting phone call violations by coaches across all 18 sports that the NCAA considers a “major infractions” case places a fair deal of blame at the feet of the athletic department’s compliance office.

“The athletics department failed to adequately monitor its sports programs,” the report read, and it also stated, “Despite having a monitoring system in place, the institution failed to follow those procedures in that telephone calls were not adequately monitored.”

Some of that blame is rightly deserved. Some of that needs context.

What isn’t explained in the report, which the Tribune obtained through an Iowa opens record request, is that ISU’s compliance department appears to be as small as any in the Big 12 for most, if not all, of the 2008-11 time frame when the violations occurred. The office was comprised by four members: Josh Snyder, associate athletics director for compliance; Eileen Flaherty, assistant director of compliance; Dustin Gray, associate director of athletics for compliance; and Ed Banach, assistant director of athletics for compliance.

A search of Big 12 schools’ websites shows that four programs in the conference currently have compliance departments with at least six workers, including Texas (at least 10) and Oklahoma (at least nine). Texas Tech and Oklahoma State each have six working in their compliance office.

Baylor and Kansas each have five, which is the number ISU currently has, according to its website.

The lack of manpower in ISU compliance became magnified and more problematic when the ACS phone call monitoring software wasn’t utilized correctly, a source said. The monitoring system — which was purchased in the summer of 2009, according to the report — wasn’t automatic, and trouble stemmed in importing the phone records and/or coaches’ monthly logs.

Without a complete list of phone records, the software didn’t red flag the violations when comparing calls to the NCAA recruiting calendars. This software problem persisted for months at least, a source said. Human eyes didn’t notice the violations either when random sports were manually audited in what was a tedious process.

Before the ACS software was purchased, Flaherty was the one who conducted the monthly manual audits. But it’s unclear whether such complete audits continued after the summer of 2009, the report said, perhaps because of the focus on and problems with the input of data into the new software program.

On four occasions during the 2008-’09 academic year — the only time period that was for certain randomly audited in a complete manner — phone call violations occurred in a sport that was subjected to a random monthly audit by a compliance official. Those weren’t caught, which is one reason ISU acknowledged a “failure to monitor,” the report said.

The compliance department had no inkling that such widespread violations were occurring, a source said. Further complicating matters was that ISU compliance had a smaller operations budget than many of its peers, a source said.

Snyder, the former director, now holds the same position at Missouri-Kansas City after leaving ISU in December 2010. Gray, then the associate director, is now the director of compliance at ISU. Flaherty left ISU in July 2010 and is now a senior women’s administrator at Maine.

None of those three commented to the Tribune on Monday. Banach still works in ISU compliance, according to the athletic department website. ISU athletic director Jamie Pollard didn’t return a call seeking comment Monday, and the school hasn’t publicly spoken on the infractions case.

Where ISU compliance perhaps should be held most accountable is in its failure to communicate clearly. Snyder wanted Flaherty to include at least one football or men’s basketball coach in her monthly manual audits because of the high-profile nature of those sports, but that didn’t consistently happen, the report said. Those two sports had the most violations. Snyder also didn’t receive monthly copies of Flaherty’s audits, the report said.

The report also chides ISU compliance providing “inadequate” education to its coaching staff members in regards to logging all calls, the crux of what made this a “major infractions” case. In July 2008, Gray sent an email clearly refuting the existence of a “three-minute rule” — an old coaching belief that any call lasting fewer than three minutes wasn’t a countable call toward the limit — and stressing the significance of logging calls.

Compliance restated that point as part of a wide-ranging PowerPoint presentation in 2009 to coaches in all sports, but the school has no documentation to prove it educated coaches after that. A good deal of ISU coaches have been hired since then, and some said they didn’t understand their obligations.

“Many of the coaches interviewed by the institution and/or the enforcement staff reported that they did not know, nor were they ever told by compliance, that it was necessary for them to log all telephone calls placed to prospects, even calls where no contact was made or a voicemail message was left,” the report states.

However, a table in the report based on a random survey of logs also shows that more than 95 percent of the time, coaches were properly logging non-countable calls, so compliance’s message was understood by many.